32 dULY b 4) I' 2, , SHOUTS AND MURMURS THE VANISHING LADY T HEN there was the story-told me some years ago as a true copy of a leaf from the dread secret archives of the Paris police-of the woman who disappeared during the \V orld Exposition as suddenly, as com- pletely and as inexplicably as did Doro- thy Arnold ten years later from the sidewalks of N ew York. As I first heard the story, it began with the arrival from Marseilles of an Englishwoman and her young, inex- perienced daughter, a girl of seven- teen or thereabouts. The mother was the frail, pretty widow of an English officer who had been stationed in India, and the two had just come from Bom- bay, bound for home. In the knowl- edo-e that, after reaching there, she b . . would soon have to cross to ParIs to sign some papers affecting her hus- band's estate, she decided at the last minute to shift her passage to a Mar- seilles steamer, and, by going direct to Paris, look up the lawyers there and finish her business before crossing the Channel to settle forever and a day in the \Varwickshire village where she was born. Paris was so tumultuously crowded for the Exposition that they counted themselves fortunate when the cocher deposited them at the Crillon, and they learned that their precautionary tele- o-ram from Marseilles had miraculous- b ly caught a room on the wing-a double room with a fine, spacious sit- ting-room looking out on the Place de la Concorde. I could wish that they had wired one of those less magnificent caravanseries, if only that I might revel ao-ain in such a name as the Hote] of b Jacob and of England, or, 'better still, the Hotel of the Universe and of Portu- gal. But, as the story reached me, it was to the Crillon that they went. The long windows of their sitting- room gave on a narrow, stone-railed balcony and were half-shrouded in heavy curtains of plum-colored velvet. As again and again the girl later on had occasion to describe the look of that room when first she saw it, the walls were papered in old rose. A high- backed sofa, an oval satinwood table, a mantel with an ormolu clock that had run down-these also she recalled. The girl was the more relieved that there would be no need of a house-to- house search for rooms, for the mother had seemed unendurably exhausted from the long train ride, and was now of such a color that the girl's first idea was to call the house physician, hop- ing fervently that he spoke English, for neither she nor her mother spoke any French at all. T HE doctor, when he came- a dusty, smelIy little man with a wrinkled face lost in a thicket of whiskers, and a reassuring Legion of Honor ribbon in the buttonhole of his lapel-did speak a little English. After a long, grave look and a few questions put to the tired woman on the bed in the shaded room, he called the girl into the sitting-room and told her frankly that her mother's con- dition was serious; that it was out of the question for them to think of going on to England next day; that on the morrow she might better be moved to a hospital, etc., etc. All these things he would attend to. In the meantime he wanted the girl to go at once to his home and fetch him a medicine that his wife would give her. It could not be as quickly prepared in any chemist's. U nfor- tunately, he lived on the other side of Paris and had no telephone, and with all Paris en fête it would be perilous to rely on any messenger. Indeed, it would be a saving of time and worry if she could go, armed wi th a note to his wife he was even then scribbling in French at a desk in the sitting- room. In the lobby below, the mana- ger of the hotel, after an excited colloquy with the doctor, took charge of her most sympathetically, himself putting her into a satin and, as far as she could judge, volubly directing the driver how to reach a certain house in the Rue Val du Grâce, near the o bservatoire. I T was then that the girl's agony began, for the ramshackle victoria crawled through the festive streets and, as she afterwards realized, more often than not crawled in the wrong direc- tion. The house in the Rue Val du ") Grâce seemed to stand at the other end of the world, when the carriage came at last to a halt in front of it. The girl grew old in the time which passed before any answer came to her ring at the bell. The doctor's wife, when finally she appeared, read his note again and again, then with much muttering and rattling of keys stationed the girl in an airless waiting room and left her there so long that she was weeping for very desperation, before the medicine was found, wrapped and turned over to her. A hundred times during that wait she rose and started for the door, de- termined to stay no longer but to run back empty-handed through the streets to her mother's bedside. A thousand times in the wretched weeks that fol- lowed she loathed herself for not hav- ing obeyed that impulse. But always there was the feeling that having come so far and having waited so long, she must not leave without the medicine just for lack of the strength of will to stick it out a little longer-perhaps only a few minutes longer. Then the snail's pace trip back to the Right Bank was another nightmare, and it ended only when, at the cocher's mulish determination to deliver her to some hotel in the Place Vendôme, she leaped to the street and in sheer terror appealed for help to a passing young man whose alien tweeds and boots told her he was a compatriot of hers. He was still standing guard beside her five minutes later when, at long last, she arrived at the desk of the Crillon and called for her key, only to have the very clerk who had handed her a pen to register with that morning look at her without recognition and blandly ask "Whom does Mademoiselle wish to see?" At that a cold fear clutched her heart, a sudden surrender to a panic that she had fought back as preposterous when first it visited her as she sat and twisted her handkerchief in the waiting room of the doctor's office on the Left Bank; a panic born when, after the doctor had casually told her he had no telephone, she heard the fretful ringing of its bell on the other side of his walnut door. -ALEXANDER W OOLLCOTT (To be continued)